In loco parentis
by LiutenantEri
Summary: Luna TT, AU. The Battle of Hogwarts did not end in Voldemort's death. After years of fighting, hiding, and watching people dying, Luna takes drastic measures to send herself to the past. What will she change? And what will it cost her?


To be Wicked

Prologue: Traveling in Time

A faint flutter of wings and a dark shadow flitted through the half-shuttered window. The night was cool and let a cool breeze into the normally stuffy corridor. A silent figure turned down the stairs and to the farthest room on the right. Entering with nary a word, she approached one of seven occupied beds and cast a Notice-Me-Not charm and a silencing spell before her blue eyes settled on the softly snoring man. She withdrew a thick needle and pierced his elbow, watching silently as his eyes fluttered open and his thick blood flowed into a clean mason jar, spelled to hold more than its original volume. Good potions-grade glassware was difficult to find these days.

"Hhhungh—"

She merely raised an eyebrow as his eyes widened for second before fluttering close again. Noticing the blood flow was slowing down, she withdrew the needle, set a stasis spell on the container, and removed a vial of blood-replenishing potion from her sleeve. She had planned on feeding her father the potion for the longer he survived, the more time she would have before they suspected her. Not that they had the manpower to track her down, they would simply assume she was trying to accelerate her ability to inherit the Lovegood vault… she had expected to feel more at this stage. Some sort of remorse. Longing. Apparently the familial bond had degraded past that, so she stowed the potion back in her sleeve and slipped out the door.

Xeno dragged his eyes open as his heart pumped feebly and erratically. The last thing he saw was a glimmer of flaxen hair he wasn't sure he hadn't imagined before he plunged into darkness.

The nurse in charge of the wayward medical station found him a few hours later, feeble, disoriented, and unable to pull together a coherent sentence, not that they expected it from this particular patient. Perhaps the old man had known the end was near, because he asked mostly after his daughter even in his weak and delirious state. In any case, ootions and spells helped him hold on longer but the ward had one unoccupied bed only a few days later.

=^.^=

Luna waited in the dark as the two hooded figures patrolling Diagon Alley moved past Fortescue's. She slipped into the ruins of Weasleys Wizard Wheezes and headed to the basement. This should be her last stop before the Rook. She had left it for last not only because the memories were ripe in her mind, but because Diagon Alley was constantly monitored. The Dark Lord was had cronies everywhere. But ironically, they were most vigilant in newer areas the rebellion may have expanded into and only stationed a scheduled guard in older, known vestiges of the war. They were expected to be guarded, had already been ransacked… as far as they knew.

She walked to the dusty cracked mirror and walked backward towards the otherside of the room, keeping her eye on the reflection of the shelves of broken ingredients. She quietly navigated the around the overturned, cracked, and scored table, overturned chairs, and boxes strewn around the floor. When she was about two feet from the wall, the image of one of the few unbroken vials on the shelf behind her sparkled for a moment. She frowned. The vial had been knocked on its side but she should still—

Luna stood on her tiptoes and used the image in the cracked mirror to approximate where the vial would be if the shelf was right behind her rather than another two feet away. She felt the cork top and breathed a sigh of relief as she plucked it out of thin air and turned around. The shelf on the wall was undisturbed and the cracked mirror had lost its sheen. She let herself out silently, before the patrol looped back and was in the air towards Ottery St. Catchpole.

She spread her wings and glided in—not difficult as half of the building had crumbled away in the attack five years ago. Thankfully her parents' room was still mostly there. Quickly, she cleared the space that would have been at the foot of the bed had a bed been there. Luna brought out the vial of her father's blood and put it carefully next to another three jars. One contained an equal amount of her own blood, the second contained dust she had scraped from the inside of her mother's bones, which she had dug up three weeks ago. The third held a silvery fluid that she dipped a quill pen into. She carefully inscribed runes in a circle around her, repeating the pattern, spiraling inwards towards her feet. When she was done, she wandlessly levitated the three remaining jars and her deft fingers pulled their contents out, mixed them, twirled them above her in a cone-like spiral that mimicked the dancing form of the runes. Two incantations later, a glimmering blue-green dust flickered down from the red blood, lighting up the runes as they landed softly on the ground. Luna banished the blood and watched as the runes pulsed.

One.

Two.

Three.

The spiral flared and a yellow-green light moved through the runes, starting on the outside and moving inwards, the runes disappearing as the light passed. She knelt down, drew a slit in her palm with a knife and placed her bleeding hand on the last rune as the light flared through it and onto her. Now the runes appeared on her skin, spread through her body, and with nary a sound, consumed it. Her spirit however, traveled. Anchored only by her magic and that of those most closest to her by blood, she sped through the normal barriers that held time linear and appeared at the foot of a bed, at another Rook, this one a sturdy building, above a mother and her baby.

Hot pain rushed through her. The baby belonged here, she did not. What she held was muddled, dark, bleeding, hurt—the baby was light. A light and peacefulness she could fold herself into, give herself up for—but instead she twisted it, hungered for it, made it her own. She knew the light would be shortlived and she had made plans. She had lived too long past her peers, understood the ruthlessness behind war and how morals were for those sitting back, directing the front lines from afar.

Pandora woke at her baby's quiet whimper.

"Luna? Sugarplum? What's the matter?" she mumbled as she turned over to check on her newborn. She reached out a hand but instinctively knew there was something wrong and woke fully, spinning to face the foot of the bed, her hand already reaching for her wand at her night table.

She saw a figure at the foot of the bed, a woman, not much older than she, flaxen hair covering her face and blue-green runes over her skin. Pandora felt a keen yearning towards the woman, almost a song. The figure extended a hand towards her and she felt herself freeze, then felt a wrenching pain come from deep within her. Not at her heart, not in her gut, but throughout her body. Blue-green fire, hungry, lapped at her and when it let her go, she slumped clumsily back on the bed.

"My magic." She whispered, barely able to hold her head up. She recognized the effects of losing her magic, if not the spell. Her body, dependent for so long in the harmony between her magic and matter, would start to go into shock and fail. "No—" she realized that must have been what had happened to Luna, why she didn't feel the baby's presence, the lack of that bond between them forged over nine… ten months—was her baby really only a month alive?—

But who would do such a thing? The figure at the foot of her bed was now beside her, helping her lay down, pulling the covers up around her. As though the woman in blue-green runes could read her mind, she found the body of her baby wrapped in a blanket and put in her arms, positioned in such a way that she could hold her without strain. She looked up and saw familiar—yet not quite known—blue eyes filled with tears behind the flaxen hair. She felt the bond strongly with this woman, more than with the dead babe in her arms and she grasped one of the shaking hands with her own.

"Luna." She whispered, knowing, but not understanding.

The figure bowed her head and kissed her forehead as the woman lost consciousness and went into cardiac arrest.

Luna, still covered in runes, wiped her eyes and withdrew a cloak from the closet. She walked down the stairs and hid in a sheltered doorway as she waited for her father to return home. In her timeline, Xeno was known for his nightly escapades before his wife's untimely death. Left with a daughter he hardly knew, a struggling business, and the sudden understanding of what he had lost had driven him to a mental break. Luna was too much like her mother for him to see without pain and guilt, which morphed itself into anger, more guilt, and quite quickly, a mental withdrawal from anything related to Pandora.

She watched with hooded eyes as her father staggered up the stairs, decidedly drunk and unabashedly loud, had there been anyone else to hear him.

"Pandy!—" he called, as a tripping hex caused him to miss the next step and tumble down towards Luna. He stopped two flights below her, a few joints obviously dislocated and from the sound of his labored and frothing breathing, perhaps a punctured lung. He was facing away from her, so she silently knelt next to him and pushed on his chest. His breath hitched and he tried to turn around but the blood was pooling in his lungs quickly now and he began to panic. The runes on her skin began to fade as they drank in his magic and she felt herself settle into this time as she felt her father's labored breaths rattle to a stop.

Luna Lovegood—she would have to shed that name, she knew—had performed the dark magic of time travel. To anchor herself, she had pooled the magic of three, gathered by blood. She would only travel to a point where all three were alive. To avoid a paradox and give herself a body, she had taken the energy and magic of her own self-a mere babe. And to stabilize her presence, she had folded the magic of the other two mages whose entities would otherwise resonate suspiciously with hers. The magic residing in her, twisted in time and space, corrupted by the forced addition of others, was tied to her and only to her-not to be passed on. The ritual was labeled Dark because it would wipe out an established bloodline. Not that she was considering having any children... there was a war and far too much to do and undo.

But the war would wait. She had landed quite early in her lifetime and Luna doubted the Potters would have been betrayed yet. She shifted into her animagus form, a slate-gray peregrine falcon with blue-rimmed eyes and went hunting. Food and rest. The war, for once, would wait.


End file.
